The Day I Became a Father

21 Years ago...March 27, 1994

It felt as if I had waited my whole life to be a dad.  I have always enjoyed being around kids and even babies. When Uncle Bruce and Aunt Kathie adopted Brian in 1969 I was enchanted:  I said to Aunt Kathie, “Finally there is someone I can tell, ‘I knew you when you were a baby.’  Three years later they adopted Suzanne.  When two members of my church family, Wayne and Marilyn, adopted precious little Robbie, he and I became inseparable on Sundays and at youth group activities.  I loved carting him around.  Then two other dear church friends Bob and Betty McClimans adopted Celynd and she gave me my first real experience with childcare. In the summer of 1978 her parents were stuck without a babysitter for the summer and I had not yet found a summer job.  Suddenly I found myself--a college freshman--caring for a baby: feeding, diapering, bathing ….everything. And, I loved it. 

Loving all of those wonderful adopted kids always made me wonder whether God was preparing me to be an adoptive parent.  And in fact, it took me so long to get married, I was not sure if I was ever going to be any kind of a parent.  By that time I had doted on several nieces and nephews. Spending Amanda’s first year living near them in Nyack and seeing my precious little niece every day only deepened my desire for fatherhood. In 1992 I finally did get married, and then to my surprise--but delight--we found ourselves almost immediately pregnant. (So much for my paranoia about infertility.) But to our great sorrow, we lost that baby at about six weeks.  When our dear obstetrician--Dr. Miller--told us the news, he broke down and wept with us. Again, I wondered if I would ever realize my dream of fatherhood.  In the sad empty void after the miscarriage I got started on a PhD program. 

Then in February of 1994, we discovered that we were once again expecting a baby.  Sally and Chris were both expecting babies that spring and we went down to visit New Wilmington on Palm Sunday weekend.  We’d been to church that morning and I was in the kitchen helping Mom fix dinner when Olga appeared in the doorway with an ashen look on her face.  I knew something was terribly wrong.  “It’s happening again,’ she said.  We jumped into the car and hurried down to the emergency room at Jameson Hospital in New Castle. 

There we encountered an ER doctor whose command of the English language was somewhat lacking.  He explained “threatening miscarriage, perhaps an ultrasound will tell us if baby alive.” Olga lay on a gurney and I knelt beside it and we cried and prayed.  They had to summon in an ultrasound technician who had a long drive to the hospital.  That endless, agonizing wait at Jameson is seared into my memory forever.  When the technician finally arrived, still wearing his civilian clothes, he took us off to another wing.  As we passed through the lobby, I saw that my sweet mom had driven in after us, still in her Sunday clothes, the uneaten Sunday dinner still on the table.  She sat in the waiting room and gave me a brave and encouraging smile as we whisked past.  I knew she was praying for us.

The technician--who spoke English as his first language--was very kind and friendly.  He explained that an ultrasound at only about five weeks may not show anything at all as that was barely enough time for the heartbeat to begin.  I asked if he would tell us what he saw.  “That’s against policy,” he explained, “the doctor has to go over the results with you.” That seemed so unfair and illogical to me, the man in the ER was not our doctor and he barely spoke English, but I was too emotionally spent to try to argue against the policy.  He looked sympathetically at our tear-stained faces as he hooked up the equipment. 

Time seemed to freeze as he rolled the sensor around Olga’s stomach, searching for any sign of life…my hopes dwindled.  Then….”I SEE A HEARTBEAT!” he crowed!  Then immediately, “Don’t tell them I told you!” He guided our eyes to the screen and showed us a faint little flicker in the fuzzy pattern.  It mostly looked like a TV channel that was not coming in.  But once he put his finger on it, we could see the steady pattern that he meant. 

In that moment, I became a father.  In that moment, I first glimpsed Anthony Jay Nichols, who would arrive safely about 30 weeks later.  In that moment, I fell in love with that teeny-tiny pinprick of a heartbeat.  If anyone had tried to harm that microscopic beating heart, I could have torn him apart with my bare hands.  My 21-year (and counting) adventure as a father, the greatest in my life, began at Jameson Hospital on that terrible and glorious Palm Sunday afternoon. 

I know that people agonize deeply over the question of when life begins, but for me that question was answered that day.  That baby was as much my son on that day as he is on this day as a big strong junior in college.